This project area addresses the need to apply basic research findings in the context of the "real world" prevention practitioner. Researchers and practitioners will to come together to integrate new knowledge about adolescent transitions, drug use behaviors, and youth focused prevention initiatives to inform school-based programming efforts. The initial activities of this project area will follow the model of NIDA's Behavioral Therapies Development Program (PA-03-066). A "Stage I" pilot will take place in the first two years of the grant period. Year one will involve the structured interaction of researchers and practitioners (including research scientists, consultants and advisors, personnel from local educational settings and state agencies) with the aim of developing a peer led prevention curriculum with an adult mentoring component. Obviously, building an effective curriculum is essential. We plan to follow the guiding principals of our proposed TPRC and will match program components to the transitional challenges facing our youth, as well as to important mediating risk and protective factors associated with drug abuse among adolescents. We anticipate that program development refinement will be ongoing throughout the grant period, as findings from this and the two other project areas will provide direction for our program contents and delivery strategies. The proposed activities in the pilot phase, conducted with our laboratory high school, will be used to document and evaluate 1) the content of program components, 2) the processes of recruit- ment, training, implementation and fidelity and 3) evidence of short-term changes in outcomes of interest in order to provide the empirical support for taking the program to scale. In year three we will assign three conditions within our laboratory high school to receive either 1) treatment as usual (N=125), 2) the peer led program only (N=125) or 3) the peer led and mentoring program (N=125). The design will allow a determination at the end of intervention, and at the beginning of two subsequent school years (years 4 and 5) of (a) intervention efficacies and effect sizes, relative to the usual curriculum, on the primary indicators of outcome; (b) intervention efficacies and effect sizes, relative to the usual curriculum, on processes specifically targeted by the intervention (i.e., bonding with peer group, coping skills, participation in extracurricular activities); (c) intervention efficacies and effect sizes, relative to the usual curriculum, on protective adolescent processes (i.e., academic achievement motivation, sense of school belonging); (d) mediation of primary outcomes by targeted intervention processes or any protective adolescent processes; and (e) moderation of significant outcomes by any demographic or process variable. In this area, we also wish to develop methods of assisting schools in their implementation of comprehensive prevention programming, as well as examining issues of adoption, adaptation, feasibility, transportability and sustainability. Finally, our aims include training students and new faculty in drug prevention programming within the high school environment and disseminating findings to prevention practitioners, researchers, and school personnel.